Advertising stuff of the year, according to me

National ad blog of 2008: I keep thinking about deleting AdPulp from my feeds. And then I notice that I bookmark it constantly.

Denver ad blog of 2008: The Egotist wins this one in a walk. They're so far ahead of everyone else that the only thing I can do is nitpick at the things I wish were different. (I wish the blog's multiple anonymous authors had different pseudonyms, so I could tell them apart. I wish the comments were threaded instead of flat. I wish there was a troll-rating system.)

National agency site of 2008: The Barbarian Group. So rich. So cool. So smart. So useful. So, so elegant.

Denver agency site of 2008: I don't know. The cool ones are hard to navigate. The elegant ones don't capture my imagination.

Local agency blog of 2008: Pure's Pure Thinking. They post frequent and interesting content. At times, they're they only agency that seems to be trying.

Blog I wish I wrote of 2008: Barbarian Group head of planning and strategy Noah Brier writes a blog much better than my own. It's sort of about advertising, sort of about the Internet, and mostly about whatever he wants.

Cool ad-like idea of 2008: See a cnn.com headline you like? One click and it's a t-shirt (not to mention a walking ad for CNN). This genius brought to you by - you guessed it - the Barbarian Group.

Cool spot of 2008: "Fate" is a statement about life's glory and inevitability. Nike, David Fincher and Wieden + Kennedy put a lump in my throat that I don't think will ever go away.

Marketing takes intelligence. Advertising takes guts.

These are words I have written before:

[Blogging] immortalizes everyday language, holding it to an impossibly lofty standard.

And I am thinking about those words now after reading a post by Noah Brier named "When Too Much Listening Is A Bad Thing."

It's precisely those emotional comments that [the Microsoft/Jerry Seinfeld ad campaign] should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didn't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... The people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.

In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback.

Brier is right. More than once I've prepared a marketing director for the idea that an ad (this radio spot, for example) might offend someone. But these days, a client might get more than a cranky phone call. He or she might get an angry blog post that an antsy junior marketing executive sends to an unpredictable CEO who forwards it to the whole senior management team, which immediately convenes a committee to seriously consider the matter. The next day the agency phone rings, a junior account coordinator picks up the call, and an effective, wonderful ad dies.

In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This Luke Sullivan wrote that we marketers get so tied up measuring public opinion, we forget that we have the power to shape it. The Internet appears to give us the ability to measure opinion more accurately than ever before. But it gives disproportionate weight and unprecedented permanence to isolated, impulsive rantings.

For the most part, I've been blessed with courageous, focused clients. But the weight of the written word makes even stout hearts wobbly. Sometimes the best course is to just sack up and plow on.

Confusion 4/23/08

Does the increasingly collective nature of modern creativity make charades like the Shave Everywhere credits inevitable? Am I suddenly sort of excited about Johannes Leonardo? Are Omnicom and Havas really posting nice profits? Did Scott Goodson just find a cooler search engine? Is Twitter on the fritz? Does the new Barabarian Group site kick ass (h/t Toad Stool)?

The answer to that last one is, "Yes." The rest are just questions buzzing through my head that I'm too busy to answer right now.

The other reason creatives stay up late

You'd like to think the late nights ad folk are famous for are just a by-product of our undying passion for the work. But that's only half the story. Alongside desire, there's fear, as Bart Cleveland explains:

The advertising industry is a great white shark, always feasting, yet never satisfied. You had better get better if you want a career that lasts for more than a few years...

The cause of the problem for many seniors in this business is that too many have avoided committing themselves to growing in responsibility or ability.

The ability that many senior-level people lack these days is Web skills. And there's been no shortage of people predicting doom.

Yesterday, it was our own Denver Egotist:

Being in such high demand, are these developers simply moving to more established landscapes, or is Denver simply a microcosm of a national drought?

On the national level, there was Brian Morrissey, quoted here via Scott Goodson:

Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.

And there was Benjamin Palmer worrying that ad agencies aren't up to the Web 2.0 challenge:

Everyone talks about how the industry is changing, nontraditional media, fragmented audiences, blah blah blah. It's true, it's progress, and it's fantastic. It is also obviously scaring the crap out of traditional ad shops.

I see this meme over and over. And I'm never quite sure who these "traditional ad shops" are. Maybe it's because I've never worked at a Madison Avenue monolith; I imagine they'd be harder to evangelize. Both of the agencies I've had the pleasure to work for in the past four years embraced Web 2.0. And when I write "embraced," I mean, "threw our arms around it and kissed it like Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams making out in The Notebook."

At TT&D, we built the first social network for iPhone users, launched a UGC contest for WOW! and asked Colorado to build us a state activity map for Colorado Farm Bureau Insurance. At Karsh\Hagan, we're enabling student-generated content for Regis University, launching McDonald's film on YouTube, and we've got a few new projects upcoming, one of which will be here on May 15.

I know these aren't quite Barbarian Group-level technology applications. I'm not trying to go toe to toe with Palmer creatively. But the "agencies genetically can't get the Intertubes" meme sounds like something invented by interactive shops. And I'm not buying it. Because as Palmer himself writes:

[I]t's not that hard to adapt, if you really want to.

In fact, ad agencies have a better 2.0 mindset than some interactive agencies. (Although many have been slow to realize their advantage.) As Ian Schafer wrote:

[I]f the agency doesn’t have a full media/creative/public relations offering, they probably won’t be able to have the right (and unbiased) experience and best practices to succeed in social media.

The answer isn't as simple as building a better Internet offering. It's about integration. Every day, I see the best Denver agencies staying up late, developing the ability to create great work across integrated media.

It makes me get all weepy. Just like that scene in The Notebook.